Announcing Tux Paint 0.9.18

(Davis, CA — November 21, 2007)
New Breed Software is proud to
announce the release of version 0.9.18 of
Tux Paint, the Open Source drawing
program for children.

Over 50,000 colors are now a click away.

Tux Paint 0.9.18's color palette now includes a rainbow-colored button
which brings up a color picker. The colors available for painting
have expanded from less than twenty to over 50,000! And now, pictures
can have any solid-colored background. The background colors —
along with the "Starter" template images that ship with Tux Paint (which
previously appeared in the "Open" dialog) — are available from a
dialog that now appears when starting fresh via the "New" button.

Drawings can have any background color; 'Starter'
templates have been moved from the 'Open' dialog.

"Magic" tools, the special effects in Tux Paint (such as blur,
smudge and grass), have been removed from the core of Tux Paint and
made into "plug-ins" which are loaded into Tux Paint when it is
launched. A programming interface has been developed and
documented, allowing anyone to easily write new "Magic" tools for
Tux Paint. One goal of this new capability is to turn Tux Paint
into a platform for teaching computer graphics programming to novice
programmers, such as high school students.

Many more Magic tools have been added.

Writing new "Magic" tools for Tux Paint is now so much easier,
a dozen new ones have been added, including a
calligraphy brush that changes
thickness depending on how fast you stroke, fun tools for adding
flowers, foamy bubbles, and water ripples to pictures,
a kaleidoscopic paint brush for drawing symmetric artwork, and a
drawing tool that colors additively (like beams of light), rather
than subtractively (like paint).

The powerful Pango text rendering
system is now used on systems that support it, providing vastly improved
display of complex languages such as Arabic and Telugu.
This version also introduces translations to Esperanto,
Ojibway and Wolof languages. Following up the previous
release's debut of "Input Method" support, the latest version adds
support for entering text in Thai and
Traditional Chinese.